September 20, 1995

'Gideon's Torch' -- A Moral Page-Turner

September 20, 1995

The time is the near future and the new Republican president is a Yankee blue blood who tilts way right, except on moral issues.

The "Christian Alliance" screamed when he won the GOP nomination, then fled to form a third party. Afterwards, some cursed politics. A few began planning rebellion.

The plot twists start early in "Gideon's Torch," the first novel by former Nixon White house counsel Charles Colson and Ellen Santilli Vaughn. A fake patient guns down a famous abortionist. The president responds with a get-tough legal crusade that intimidates pro-life moderates, but invigorates radicals. The government starts promoting late-term abortions, after researchers learn that fetal brain tissue is the key to curing AIDS. So anti-abortion activists cut into an ABC News satellite signal. Then things get complicated.

But there is more to this political thriller than blood, dirty tricks and movie-script editing. The cover needs a warning sticker: Warning -- contains disturbing moral issues. Consider this exchange between the central character, Attorney General Emily Gineen, and a powerful Christian politico.

Terry Mattingly

September 13, 1995

Banning Christian Colleges?

Terry Mattingly

September 13, 1995

Hillsdale College's Dan Bisher did what any campus leader would do, as he flipped through Money magazine's annual issue rating colleges.

First, he found Hillsdale in the Top 100 chart, at No. 31, and at No. 5 in the crucial "best buys" in the Midwest list. Then he looked for the competition. He was surprised when he couldn't find Calvin College, another of Michigan's top liberal arts colleges.

"I thought, `That's strange,'" said Bisher, Hillsdale's media-relations specialist. "Calvin's always up there in these lists."

Calvin has fared well in lists from U.S. News & World Report, National Review, the New York Times, Barron's and others. These guides consider familiar criteria, such as the quality of the faculty, library resources, entrance exam scores and the number of alumni who earn graduate degrees.

But this year, Money's 96-page guide considered another factor -- religion. Thus, 150 schools were eliminated because they were too religious. Among those dropped were nationally-known colleges such as St. Olaf, Centre and St. Mary's (Ind.), as well as Calvin, Wheaton, Gordon, Asbury, Taylor and 85 others in the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities. (In candor, another was Milligan College, where I teach.)

Terry Mattingly

September 6, 1995

The People's Republic of Boulder

Terry Mattingly

September 6, 1995

Twenty-six miles northwest of Denver is a mysterious, exotic place that many people call the People's Republic of Boulder.

Baby Boomers in Boulder are more likely to evolve into Buddhists than Baptists. Visitors to the downtown Pearl Street Mall may think they had strolled into an impromptu meeting of the World Parliament at Religions.

So some people chuckled back in 1991 when Bill Honsberger was appointed as a Conservative Baptist missionary to Colorado, and, in particular, to Boulder's new Age flocks. Obviously, the former deputy sheriff wasn't going to be a typical home, or even foreign, missionary. He was going to work in an alternative state of mind.

Today, the man that New Age Journal once labeled "Missionary Impossible" labors on, attending Hindu workshops, metaphysical fairs and meeting one-on-one with apologists for every imaginable brand of religion. But one of the toughest parts of his job is getting ordinary church leaders to realize that Boulder isn't all that unusual anymore.

"You can't find anyone, anywhere, who will admit to being a New Ager," said Honsberger. "Now, everybody's got their own brand of what's called `spirituality.' ... You have feminist spirituality and gay spirituality and environmental spirituality and people-who-pick-their-toes spirituality and you name it. It's one big pot of pluralistic soup."

Freelance Articles

Featured

What Do the Orthodox Converts Want? (2006)

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies to tell the difference between a Southern Baptist church and an Orthodox church. You can get some pretty good clues just by walking in the door and looking around. But there are some similarities between the two that might be a little trickier to spot. For instance, let me tell you about what life is like on Sunday nights in a Southern Baptist congregation.

Baptists worship at several different times during the week -- at least they did in the old days when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist pastor's son. One of those times is on Sunday nights. Back in the early 1980s, I was active in a church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in which the typical Sunday morning crowd would be about 200 to 300 people, which is rather small for a Baptist church, but fairly normal for an Orthodox parish. Then the crowd on Sunday night would be from 40 to 45 people.

Now, that ratio should sound familiar to many priests who lead Vespers services. But the similarities don’t stop there.

Before the age of 30, I became a deacon and the finance chairman of that church -- which, in the Southern Baptist way of doing things, meant that I was the only person, not excluding the pastor, who saw the annual pledge cards. I was the only person in the congregation who knew who was giving what.

If there is an experience in life that will teach you the meaning of original sin, finance chairman is that role. What I discovered through that experience is that there is no connection whatsoever between how much a family gives to the church and how much money that family makes. Instead, I found that the key connection is faithfulness in worship. If you attend the Sunday night service at a typical Baptist church and look around at the 40 people there in comparison to the 200 or 300 in attendance on Sunday morning, you will find that about 80 percent of the church's giving is accounted for in that group.

The bottom line: The Sunday night experience in a Baptist church is very similar to that in Saturday evening Vespers services in an Orthodox church. As Bishop Antoun told me once, if you look at who attends Great Vespers and comes to confession, you are looking at about 80 percent of the service, the giving, and the energy in most parishes.

Who comes to Vespers? Who comes to confession? Who comes to the feasts, and why do they come? That’s where I would like to start as we consider this question: What do the converts want?

What we’re doing @ GetReligion.org

Originally posted on getreligion.org

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don't. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don't get to see them. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.

I want to show you an an example -- a case study, if you will -- of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog that you are visiting (and we hope you come back often).

Democracy of the Dead - Snow Traditions

inter is over and it's time to pack away the shovels, down jackets, insulated boots and mittens until next year. The changing seasons teach different lessons and, this winter, I was reminded of a great truth about life. It goes something like this: There is a right way and a wrong way to shovel snow.

Perhaps you saw the headlines about the massive storms that hit the nation's capital, this past winter. Right after everyone calmed down from the Y2K scare, we were reminded that there are other ways to bring an entire region to a screeching halt.

Or, perhaps you had to dig your way out of record-breaking drifts in some other corner of the country, this year. Or perhaps you live someplace where it's normal to see several feet of snow. Perhaps you're a pro.

I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, which is hardly a great place to learn how to handle snow. We were masters of mosquito control.

But, after college, I found myself in the frozen Midwest, where shoveling snow is an art -- right up there with boiling corn and planning tailgate parties. The snow started about Thanksgiving and, before long, I realized that it wasn't going away on its own.

Several weeks, and several backaches later, I started watching the local talent. This is when it hit me: I was not the first person in the history of the world to shovel snow. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. There I was, a youngster, slumping to the side of the path in exhaustion while gray- haired neighbors soldiered on.

What did they know that I didn't know? Well, yes, there were different kinds of shovels and different kinds of techniques and some folks were more doctrinaire than others. But there were common themes, such as bending your knees, not getting the shovel TOO full and never flinging the snow into the wind. There was a right way and wrong way to face this challenge and, I decided, only a fool would go it alone.

Eventually, I humbled myself and started asking questions. The elders took me in, showed me the ropes and handed down what they had learned -- a kind of oral snow-shoveling Tradition.

Rediscovering Religion — Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue? (2003)

Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue?
(Copyright) The Poynter Institute Poynter Reports, May 2003

Lou Grant had a problem.

Actually, the city editor of the classic TV comedy had two problems.

First of all, the fictional Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor and no self-respecting journalist wanted the job. Second, Grant needed to ditch a lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter named Mal Cavanaugh.

Finally, Grant saw the light. He told Cavanaugh he was the new religion editor.

"That stinks! Before you stick me with a lousy job like that, I'd quit," said the reporter, before storming out of the room.

Grant's staff beamed. The religion beat was still vacant, but who cared?

That scenario rang true to the editors and religion reporters I interviewed while doing my graduate work at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, researching a project that reached the cover of The Quill in January, 1983.

Many religion-beat veterans were proud of their work, but felt like Rodney Dangerfield in their newsrooms. Editors kept saying that they knew religion was news, but that religion-beat stories seemed too boring, or too controversial, to warrant dedicated coverage.

That's the ticket -- too boring and too controversial.

Journalism strategies in a hostile marketplace (2001)

Soon after John Grisham finished law school in 1981, he started hanging out at the DeSoto County Courthouse on the town square in Hernando, Miss. He had tried writing a book or two at the University of Mississippi, but nothing came of it. Then one day he overheard the horrifying courtroom testimony of a 12-year-old girl who had been raped. What would happen, he asked himself, if the girl's father became so outraged that he killed the rapist?

Grisham couldn't get this story out of his head. Soon he was getting up at 5 a.m. with a notepad, writing chapter after chapter of his first courtroom drama. It took three years to finish the manuscript, and another year of rejections by dozens of companies, before Wynwood Press published 5,000 copies in 1988.

But there was more to this process than telling a story that was in his head and heart.

"While I was writing 'A Time to Kill,' I read everything that was on the New York Times list," said Grisham, at a Baylor University conference called "Art & Soul" in March, 2000. "Most of it, I said to myself, 'I can do better than this.' A lot of it, I said, 'I'll never be that good.' "

Grisham realized that he was not writing the first legal thriller. So he read the competition and he learned the rules -- the writing style of the marketplace in which he would have to compete. He created a likable hero and then he ensnared him in a dangerous conspiracy. Then he carefully plotted a way to get him out of that mess, with as many entertaining twists and turns along the way as possible to create tension.

"I didn't invent that," said Grisham.

See all…